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Research fundamentals: Crafting questions, choosing methods

Ashton Speaker Series, Spring 2018

Thursday, March 1

Waters Room, Zimmerman Library

1:00 - 2:00 PM: lunch

2:00 - 5:00 PM: workshop

Audience: librarians and library professionals

Registration for the workshop is free, but limited to 25 participants. In the event that the workshop fills, we will maintain a waitlist. Please register only if you are certain you can attend!

Research fundamentals: Crafting questions, choosing methods

In this workshop, we take the research conversation back to the inception of a study. We first focus on identifying research interests and questions. Next, following an overview of quantitative, qualitative, and critical/theoretical approaches to research, we discuss what to consider when choosing an approach. Participants will emerge from this workshop with strategies for transforming research interests into questions, and then pairing questions with methods that enable them to be explored in valid, effective, significant ways.

Facilitator Biography:

Sarah Polkinghorne is a librarian at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada and a doctoral candidate at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Her doctoral research explores the role of information in people’s everyday food lives, how people come to feel informed about food, and how information and knowledge are embodied. Sarah also has a longstanding interest in librarians’ teaching work, and she has published on this subject in venues such as the Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook, the journals In the Library with a Lead Pipe and the Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, and the proceedings of the Canadian Association for Information Science. Sarah’s role as a librarian sees her supporting students and faculty members working to find and use information, manage research data, and publish their work. Sarah has been recognized with local, national, and international awards, and she has been delighted to twice serve as a Peer Mentor at the Librarians’ Research Institute, an initiative of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. Sarah can be found at @sarahpolk and at sarahpolkinghorne.ca.